Virginia James Tufte (August 19, 1918 – March 28, 2020) was a writer and distinguished emerita professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her special fields were Milton, Renaissance poetry, and the history and grammar of English.
Virginia James Tufte | |
---|---|
Born | Virginia James August 19, 1918 Meadow Grove, Nebraska |
Died | March 28, 2020 Beverly Hills, California |
Children | Edward Tufte |
Academic background | |
Education | A. B., University of Nebraska M. A., Arizona State University M. A. and Ph.D. University of California at Los Angeles |
Virginia James was born in Meadow Grove, Nebraska,[1] one of the ten children of Micah Dickerson James and Sarah Elizabeth Bartee James. Both of her parents were from Virginia.[2] She attended Midland College and worked as a reporter at the Omaha World-Herald and the Nebraska State Journal as a young woman.[1][3]
After marriage, Tufte pursued further education, earning a bachelor's degree from the University of Nebraska in 1944,[4] a master's degree from Arizona State University, and master's and doctoral degrees in English literature from the University of California, Los Angeles.[5][6][7] Her 1964 dissertation was titled "Literary Backgrounds and Motifs of the Epithalamium in English to 1650".[8]
Tufte was a member of the English faculty of the University of Southern California for 25 years, beginning in 1964, and retiring in 1989. At USC, she won teaching awards and was a co-founder of several interdisciplinary programs.[1] She was perhaps best known for Grammar as Style (1971), which developed a new following several decades after it had gone out of print,[9] prompting her to write its successor, Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (2006).[10][11][12]
Besides her work on syntax and style, Tufte was notable for books and essays in two other areas of literary study and for a video biography. Her book The Poetry of Marriage: The Epithalamium in Europe and its Development in England (1970), a comprehensive history of the English epithalamium, grew from her doctoral research.[13] She also made studies of artists as interpreters of John Milton's poems.[14][15] Besides numerous essays and contributions to books in this field, some in collaboration with Wendy Furman-Adams of Whittier College,[16] she wrote and produced a one-hour video biography of a literary illustrator Reaching for Paradise: The Life and Art of Carlotta Petrina (1994) that has appeared on educational television stations, is archived in college and university libraries, and is in use in classrooms.[17]
Tufte's interest in life and family histories is reflected also in two collaborative books with anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, Changing Images of the Family (1981)[18] and Remembered Lives: The Work of Ritual, Storytelling and Growing Older (1992).[19]
Virginia James married Edward E. Tufte in Omaha in 1940; her husband was city engineer and public works director of the city of Beverly Hills, California, for many years.[20] Their son is Edward Rolf Tufte, an expert in the field of information design, and active as a sculptor. Virginia James Tufte was widowed when her husband died in 1999; she died in 2020, aged 101 years, at her home in Beverly Hills.[1]
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: others (link)